Meat – original title: Vlees – is a 2010 Dutch psycho drama film directed by Maartje Seyferth and Victor Nieuwenhuijs (Venus in Furs) from a screenplay by the former. It stars Titus Muizelaar, Nellie Benner, and Hugo Metsers.
The film premiered at the 2010 International Film Festival Rotterdam.
In the US, Artsploitation Films is releasing the film on VOD and DVD on September 20, 2016, describing it as “the most challenging of international genre films.”
Plot:
A large, lustful butcher, used to living out his lurid fantasies in the shop, becomes interested in his young female apprentice. The young woman, documenting everything with a video camera, enthusiastically gets involved with him. But when the butcher is murdered and a police inspector, who looks exactly like the dead butcher, investigates the crime, the story takes on a bizarre nightmare-ish quality…
Reviews:
” … a stunningly rich study of sex and death, pleasure and pain, fantasy and reality – as well as one of the most imaginative damnations of the animal industry you’ll ever experience. Yes, butchers are a tradition that goes back to the domestication of animals, but a butcher is also a metaphor for cruel and deadly people, and Meat certainly has its freezer full of dastardly delmonicos caught in their own obsessions of passive-aggressive sexual dominance and guilt.” Rick McGrath, Quiet Earth
“It’s an often dark, blackly comic film with a slight aura of sleaze enhanced especially by the location of the butcher shop. There’s a lot of mystery within, both regarding what actually occurs and the motivations of each of the characters – which makes for a wonderful change from a lot of cinema, not having everything laid out for the viewer, even by the final frame. Meat is definitely a film to absorb slowly, which matches its careful pacing nicely.” Adam Grikepelis, Letterboxd.com
